Tag Archives: social-media

At Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., admissions officers are still talking about the high school senior who attended a campus information session last year for prospective students. Throughout the presentation, she apparently posted disparaging comments on Twitter about her fellow attendees, repeatedly using a common expletive.

Perhaps she hadn’t realized that colleges keep track of their social media mentions.

Humans like being around other humans. We are extraordinarily social animals. In fact, we are so social, that simply interacting with other people has been shown to be use similar brain areas as those involved with the processing of very basic rewards such as food, suggesting that interacting with people tends to make us feel good.

However, it doesn’t take much reflection to notice that the way people interact with each other has radically changed in recent years. Much of our contact happens not face-to-face, but rather while staring at screen-based digital representations of each other, with Facebook being the most prominent example. This raises a very fundamental question – how does online interaction with other people differ from interacting with people in person?

One possible way these two interaction styles might differ is through how rewarding we find them to be. Does interacting with Facebook make us feel good as does interacting with people in real life? A recent paper suggests that the answer is “probably not.” In fact, the data from this paper suggest that the more we interact with Facebook, the worse we tend to feel.

A California proposal would allow under-18s to clear their user history of youthful indiscretions

Teenage social media users in California are in luck: A new Internet regulatory bill requires Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and other services to offer users under 18–years–old “digital erasers” that permanently scrub any posting they’ve made previously. The measure is designed to ensure that teens’ college, career, and personal prospects aren’t harmed by digital indiscretions. According to Melanie Mason and Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles Times, the measure requires websites to give underage users tools to permanently delete text, photo, and video postings from sites.

WASHINGTON — A new blog that exposes racial slurs on social media about President Barack Obama’s re-election could draw the attention of the U.S. Secret Service, even though most of its subjects — two of whom are from Maryland — appear to be of high school and college age.

The website “Hello There, Racists!” which has only existed since Nov. 11, had “outed” 77 subjects by Thursday afternoon. Its creator, who has not been identified, did not respond to an electronic request for comment.

The blog, which is hosted by the popular microblogging platform Tumblr, welcomes its visitors with a challenge:

“The (un)official motto of the GOP is ‘personal responsibility’ — so with publicly available information, let the words, names, and faces of these racists be documented so that they may be responsible for them,” the message reads.

…

While the people behind the racial slurs may find themselves in legal trouble, the website’s creator may be treading on ethically unstable ground.

“If all this stuff is publicly available, and they’re taking the information without using any illegal methods, it’s fair game,” said Bradley Shear, a Bethesda lawyer specializing in social media and Internet law. “Everyone has a right to state their opinion; however, people also have a right to be held accountable.”

Shear said social media users need to be aware of the dangers of reckless tweeting, but suggested the lesson could serve as a teaching moment — however bruising the lesson may be.